Gone are the days when IT systems were mere recording keeping, process driven, front-end applications. We are now in age where IT is one of the driving force behind business. Resilient, Intelligent, high Performance, Self Learning and Context Aware IT eco-system is need of future. Are you ready?

Been in an Insurance domain for last 11 years (excluding 1 year of banking) career, I have seen many changes in the way we do business, right from when I started by career in 2006, where buzzwords in IT were like Portlet, Customer Portals, SOA, ESB, load balancing till recent years of chat-bots, Big Data analytics for risk profiling, IoT, cloud, mobile applications, social data, sharing economy, augmented reality, block chain for record keeping etc. Focus had completely changed from supporting daily business processes to creating new opportunity for sales by targeting specific customers on basis of information from intelligent backend analytical systems and getting engaged directly with customer for better experience. Although insurance was always about assessing the risk and insuring it, but with new age technology, the whole process has become more faster and intelligent. Further, the younger tech savvy generation of India, are giving more preference to online & mobile channel than before. Thus adding requirement of more engaging and high performance systems than before. In nutshell, we need a complete IT eco-system which can be,

Resilient to failures. In case of failures (hardware/software), which can happen any time, system (not just application) should be able to recover on its own quickly. Traditional way of disaster recovery process (cold / warm), IT support tickets, downtime will hamper daily business along with brand value like never before. Have you considered resilience as one of the factor while building your system? Do you leverage public cloud and services offered by them? Apart from system failures, there can be failure in business decisions or business strategy (no one have full proof strategy) and need to reassess same along with possible corrective measures. How quickly you can change anything in your systems? Are you still dwelling in fixed bid waterfall model or have your own DevOps story along with CI/CD developed in your IT genes?

High in Performance. Nowadays, more and more people are purchasing insurance products online. Most of the traffic is from mobile devices. As per MMA report for 2016-17, on an average, most of the Indians spend approximately 3 hours on an average daily on mobile phone. Mobile devices have different requirement when compared to laptop/desktop. Smaller form factor, resulting in limited screen size, requires specifically targeted content to be shown on-screen. Further, poor network connectivity (Compared to wired network at home/office), needs lighter contents, targeting to specific consumer needs. Further, you may have various other channels in future with various smart devices coming into picture (Smart TV, smart Car, smart consumer appliances) where you will do sale as well as service. Overall, your customer facing systems / applications should have leaner & lightweight frontend OR you should have strategy to deliver rich content specifically targeted to individual customer needs using different mechanisms to deliver content at real-time (websockets, HTTP2 etc). Have you considered these factors while developing your applications? Was performance SLA one of the NFR in your RFP? In case if you have to trade-off richness of content with performance, what will be more important? How much your customer facing apps/systems dependent on backend record keeping system (Core Insurance application)? Are they tightly coupled? ESB vs microservices? Does your CDN provides you what you want? How are you assessing same? Do you know that engaging with CDN does not give same performance across all region?

Intelligent, self learning and context aware. With progress in computer processing power and advent of public clouds, we are having new era of highly intelligent systems. Rather, completely intelligent eco system; right from data source(IoT telemetry, wearable), to processing (big data analytics, AI models, NLP), to customer service (chat-bot, drone, smart cars, smart cities). Insurance is surely not behind. It is rather one of the ideal business domain for such intelligent eco-system. How efficiently you collect data? what data sources you have at your disposal? Are you engaging with other business domains (manufacturing / services) for data? Do you have capability to process the collected data within its full volume and generate meaningful information? How flexible and self learning you analytical model is? How are you planning to use this information? How are you planning to deliver this information to right destination within your business/IT landscape? Is your end system context aware and present only contextual right information? Is everything integrated in seamless manner? High in performance and resilient to failure?

There are many questions which you need to ask to check whether you are ready for future. Some are outlined above, some might be missed and you need to figure out on your own. Remember, if you are traditional Insurance company, carrying out your daily business process, trying to achieve given business targets; you might need to take a moment and think, does Insurance going to be same in future. We have few fin-tech insurance companies eager to join this lucrative insurance market. Technology is the driving factor for their business model. And they are future ready (they have to be). Are you prepared?

I will posting series of blogs on this topic. Stay connected.